Socialist Strategy Research Articles

Labour and the Politics of Internationalism, 1906-1914

Historians have traditionally characterized the early Labour party as an insular, ‘labourist’ organization out of sync with the mainstream of European socialism and indifferent to foreign affairs and internationalism. However, this perspective is deeply misguided, as Labour's ‘Big Four’—MacDonald, Snowden, Hardie and Glasier—used their positions of authority in the Labour Party, Independent Labour Party (ILP) and the British Section of the International to place foreign policy and socialist internationalism at the heart of their efforts to further the Labour alliance. This article explores two aspects of the ‘politics of internationalism’: first, the Labour leadership's use of socialist internationalism to legitimate the Labour alliance with trade unions in the face of criticism from the ILP left wing; second, the party's portrayal of itself as a more faithful exponent of a Gladstonian moral foreign policy than the Liberal government. Labour and the ILP were crucial allies in the revisionist and pragmatic wing of the Second International, and these ties allowed the ‘Big Four’ to portray the Labour coalition as in keeping with democratic socialist strategy in Europe. At the same time, historians should explore the possibility that Labour's parliamentary and public interventions on foreign affairs aimed to undermine Liberalism on its left flank by exploiting radical concerns over the Liberal government's foreign policy, particularly its dealings with Russia, to portray Labour as the defenders of the Gladstonian tradition in foreign affairs and, hence, as the only conscionable choice for progressives in the twentieth century.

Making different equal? Fractured state and ruptured policy: The National Qualifications Framework in South Africa

This paper explores the making of the National Qualifications Framework (NQF) in South Africa, and asks how a policy that was intended to unite education and training, and build new forms of equality, failed to become hegemonic as the new state established itself. In so doing, it engages, and argues for, theoretical tools that help keep ‘the state’ at the centre of policy analysis. The paper explores a rupture within the NQF between the fields of education and training by examining practices through which the policy developed between 1985 and 2007. Informed by involvement in these events, the author draws on data gathered from documents and interviews with over 70 participants engaged in making the NQF. Using a conceptual vocabulary derived from Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theory the paper analyses the way social antagonisms were constructed and political frontiers drawn in changing political conditions [Laclau, E., Mouffe, C., 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. Verso, London]. The paper argues that the emergence, development and rupture in the NQF can be explained in relation to shifting hegemonic practices that sought to organise social relations throughout the transition and within the post-apartheid era. The policy is portrayed as a feature of the political transition, marking the articulation of elements within the fields of education and training by hegemonic formations concerned with securing a democratic economy within a global market. The analysis runs that there has been a failure to maintain hegemony and that a rupture has occurred along a fault line within the South African state between practices building a corporatist state and those constructing a developmental state. The paper argues that the fractures built into the South African NQF point to complex challenges that states ‘at the margins’ face when simultaneously articulating with differing, contradictory globalised practices, whilst also seeking to build equitable national education systems. Local concerns remain significant in struggles to re-make the state, and education and training policy.

Change the World Without Taking Power? The Libertarian Communist Tradition in France Today

This paper assesses the contribution to the ideological and practical renewal of the left in contemporary France made by libertarian communism, notably the organization ‘Alternative Libertaire’ (AL, created in 1991). It first examines the development of this tradition out of: (i) tendencies within the anarchist-communist movement; (ii) certain critical Marxist currents. It goes on to analyse the ideology and practice of AL and discerns a number of core characteristics which it is argued mark AL's originality: an emphasis on the role of the social movement (trade unions and New Social Movements), its autonomy and reliance on direct action; a rejection of parliamentary politics and of the usefulness of party political representation of the movement; a commitment to debate and the pursuit of a broad ‘social front’; a vision of a libertarian socialist society based on equality and self-management; a conception of revolution based on a reassessment of traditional anarchist and socialist strategies.

Bringing Discourse Theory into Media Studies

When Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe published an elaborate version of their discourse theory inHegemony and Socialist Strategy(1985), they were met with fierce resistance by a unified front of traditional Marxists and anti-poststructuralists. The debates on post-Marxism dominated much of the book’s reception. This focus, combined with discourse theory’s rather abstract nature, its lack of clear methodological guidelines, and its more natural habitat of Political Studies, caused discourse theory to remain confined to this realm of Political Studies, despite the broad ideological definition of the political preferred by the authors. This article aims to revisit discourse theory and bring it into the realm of Media Studies. A necessary condition to enhance discourse theory’s applicability in Media Studies is the re-articulation of discourse theory into discourse theoretical analysis (DTA). DTA’s claim for legitimacy is supported in this article by two lines of argument. Firstly, a comparison with Critical Discourse Analyses (CDA) at the textual and contextual level allow us to flesh out the similarities — and more importantly — the differences between CDA and DTA. Secondly, DTA’s applicability is demonstrated by putting it to work in a case study, which focuses on the articulation of audience participation through televisional practices. Both lines of argument aim to illustrate the potential, the adaptability and the legitimacy of DTA’s move into media studies.

Branding higher education: Equivalence and difference in developing identity

This article examines the development of university identity within and between the language of higher education policy and the marketing activities of universities. Empirical material gathered from a three and a half-year ethnographic study illustrates how the language of marketing activity appeals to diverse audiences and how this activity connects to higher education policy. Drawing upon analytical concepts derived from Laclau and Mouffe (Laclau E. Mouffe C. Hegemony and socialist strategy: towards a radical democratic politics. London: Verso, 1985.) and Laclau (Laclau E. Emancipation(s). London: Verso, 1996., Laclau E. Constructing universality. In: Butler J. Laclau E. Žižek S., editors. Contingency, hegemony, universality: contemporary dialogues on the left. London: Verso, 2000., Laclau E. On populist reason. London: Verso; 2005.), this article explores how brand identity arises in moments of articulation. With the increasing weight given to vocational relevance in higher education, discourses of policy and university marketing activity give rise to the undecidable university identity.

The Concept of the Subject in Laclau

In this article Laclau's conception of the subject as ‘the distance from undecidability to the decision’ is explained, defended and criticised. The starting point of Laclau's intervention, namely the impasse of both the transcendental and structuralist conceptions of the subject, is sketched and the conception of the subject in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (HSS) is examined and its shortcoming pointed out. Laclau's post-HSS conception of the subject stricto sensu, that is, as distinct from the ‘full ego subject’ or subject qua ‘subject-position’, is then presented and contrasted with the theories of the subject advanced by Sartre and Zizek. In conclusion, Laclau's conception is itself criticised on the ground that it excludes the subject's own contribution to its emergence – the subject cannot be reduced to ‘the distance from undecidability to the decision’, but must also refer to the distance from antagonism to undecidability.

All you need is love: ciudadanía, género y educación en los debates del primer socialismo argentino

En este trabajo presento un análisis de las estrategias socialistas para la producción de una ciudadanía moderna, en el período fundacional del socialismo (1896-1910), coincidente con el momento de sistematización de la escolarización básica en Argentina. El estudio de aquellos debates socialistas reviste especial interés para las problemáticas de género, puesto que el socialismo constituye una de las formaciones políticas que en Argentina defendió activamente la emancipación femenina e impulsó muy tempranamente la producción de una ciudadanía moderna para ambos sexos.

Laclau and Mouffe's Hegemonic Project: The Story So Far

This paper seeks to do two things: first, to map out in a broad way Laclau and Mouffe's intellectual development, since the publication of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy in 1985, and how they have created a following within academia; and second, to evaluate their ‘hegemonic’ endeavours so far. I argue that there is a place for a post-structuralist approach to the study of political ideologies and the ‘political’, but that the project as a whole is unlikely to achieve its intellectual and political ambitions.

Laclau or Mouffe? Splitting the Difference

The majority of those who comment upon the theories of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe - both supporters and critics - treat the work of the two authors as a coherent unity. I see acute differences that demarcate the ideas of Laclau and Mouffe: differences that impede any straightforward delimitation of the authorial identity `Laclau and Mouffe'. The purpose of this paper is to bring to the fore the incommensurate political differences that separate the work of the two authors, and to establish the superiority of Mouffe's position. At its most basic both authors view politics as described in their co-authored Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: i.e. `as a practice of creation, reproduction and transformation of social relations' (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 153). This agreement, however, conceals the fact that the authors describe the political articulation of social relations in distinct ways, and that those descriptions are implicated in, and reinforce, contrasting ethico-political commitments and prescriptions. These differences reflect the differences between the politics of the Marxist tradition retained by Laclau - albeit understood as a negative apparition of its former (ultimately) fully positive self - and Mouffe's radical democratic pluralism. This latter perspective - in its more recent formulations - represents a political compound of civic-republicanism with a defense of liberalism; this is a political imaginary that retains little if anything from the Marxist tradition.

Resisting Capital: Simulationist and Socialist Strategies

Postmodern theory has problematized the concepts and concerns of Marxism with respect to socialist praxis. One of the most diligent examples of this engagement comes from Jean Baudrillard's simulation theory. Pronouncing the death of Marxist categories, such as depth and revolution, simulation theory offers an aleatory, indeterminate model of society where the real implodes into the hyperreal. With special attention to the concept of resistance, this essay assesses the conceptual framework of both simulation and socialist theory for their promises and problems in the context of postmodernity. Bringing historical materialism into dialogue with simulation theory reasserts the importance of Marxism in addressing the unfinished project of social emancipation. There is much to suggest that with the real becoming hyperreal, exploitation intensifies into hyperexploitation. In short, notwithstanding the merits of simulation theory, Marxist concepts and concerns are still central to both radical theory and praxis. Bringing the merits of simulation theory to Marxism offers a social theory of meaning in the context of capitalism.

The Rhythm of Happening: Antagonism and Community in Brenda Longfellow's Our Marilyn and A Balkan Journey

Bien qu'ils soient différents au niveau de la forme, les documentaires de « Brenda Longfellow Our Marilyn et A Balkan Journey: Fragments for the Other Side of War partagent certaines stratégies qui examinent les rapports empathiques entre S le corps des femmes et la collectivité. Ces rapports peuvent être étudiés à la lumière j de ce qu'Ernesto Ledau et Chantal Mouffe appellent « l'antagonisme », à savoir, les différends qui habitent toujours les systèmes discursifs qui tentent de constituer une totalité unifiée. L'antagonisme dans Our Marilyn s'érige contre les identités nationales et autres mythes nationaux. Dans A Balkan Journey l'antagonisme se 3 retrouve dans de nombreuses activités pratiquées par les femmes et qui défient les structures patriarcales de leur pays.

The Spiral of Capitalism and Socialism: Toward Global Democracy. By Terry Boswell and Christopher Chase-Dunn. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000. 281p. $55.00 cloth, $23.50 paper.

In introductory international relations courses, we were once accustomed to contrast three alternative approaches: realism, liberalism, and Marxism. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the proclaimed triumph of liberal politicoeconomic ideas has led to a deemphasis on the third paradigm or, in some cases, its substitution by constructivism. But, contrary to Fukuyama, history has not quite ended. Neo-Marxist inter- pretations of international relations persist, and new and interesting ones continue to emerge. The latest entry, Boswell and Chase-Dunn's new book, is a case in point. As long-time and leading contributors to world systems theory, they employ their theoretical interpretation of modern his- tory (the last 500 years) to explain what went wrong with socialism and how the socialist strategy might still be salvaged in a future world-system (with a hyphen).

One hundred years of???

Marxian socialism has bequeathed contradictory ideas about the course of capitalist development. There is "the proletariat," the anticipation that workers were being simplified into a uniform mass, living at the bottom of society, and "having no country of their own." On the other hand, there is an historical tendency for the relations and even the forces of production to become more deeply social in character, ultimately to burst the confining integument of private property and capitalism itself. Modem socialism continues to be influenced by echoes of that proletariat, but has tended to ignore opportunities provided by the increasingly social character of our mode of production, assuming that those are tasks to be taken up on some distant tomorrow. If the decline of socialism is to be radically reversed, the proletarian echo will have to be muted even further, and the increasing socialization of the mode of production taken up as an existing threat and a striking opportunity. The expectation of a revolutionary proletariat neither can nor does function as the underpinning for socialist strategies of change. Of course, that is not the same thing as socialist sensitivity to the very poor and to inequality generally, but the two are often confused. If there were such a thing as proletarianization, then a realistic and ultimately dominant political movement could be based upon it, but contemporary socialist sympathy for the poor and the denied has much more morality than strategy to it, and to that extent does not supply a sufficiently acute political perspective. I am not saying, "Devil take the poor," nor denying their permanence while capitalism still exists. But an anticapitalist transformation of society now requires a different socialist fulcrum.

Post‐Marxist Project: An Assessment and Critique of Ernesto Laclau

The writings of Ernesto Laclau are an important contribution to various efforts over the last decade and a half to move beyond or resolve a theoretical impasse in Marxist thought and analysis. In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, co‐authored with Chantelle Mouffe and published in 1985, Laclau seeks to establish a post‐Marxist form of analysis that takes a theoretical position “within Marxism.” It is argued that post‐Marxism as formulated by Laclau is an abandonment, not a renewal, of Marxist thought and that as such it is part of a long tradition of idealist anti‐Marxist criticism that should be rejected for its theoretical flaws and misplaced criticism.

Negotiating the boundaries of the domestic: british socialist women and the politics of consumption

Abstract Historically, socialist strategy has privileged production over consumption, yet consumption was a space in which socialist women could have constructed a woman-focused politics. This article discusses the possibility of a politics of consumption where consumption provided the focus for overt political demands around which consumer-centred tactics were developed. It explores an attempt by British socialist women to create a politics of consumption around shopping for food. Although Margaretta Hicks and the National Women's Council of the British Socialist Party ultimately failed to reorder socialist priorities, they did try to build a politics of consumption in the years 1912 to 1915. Their significance was to imagine one way in which the border between the ‘domestic’ and the ‘political’ could be dissolved so that consumption and production could be recognised as complementary and equally necessary spheres of socialist politics.

Negotiating the boundaries of the domestic: British socialist women and the politics of consumption

Historically, socialist strategy has privileged production over consumption, yet consumption was a space in which socialist women could have constructed a woman-focused politics. This article discusses the possibility of a politics of consumption where consumption provided the focus for overt political demands around which consumer-centred tactics were developed. It explores an attempt by British socialist women to create a politics of consumption around shopping for food. Although Margaretta Hicks and the National Women's Council of the British Socialist Party ultimately failed to reorder socialist priorities, they did try to build a politics of consumption in the years 1912 to 1915. Their significance was to imagine one way in which the border between the ‘domestic’ and the ‘political’ could be dissolved so that consumption and production could be recognised as complementary and equally necessary spheres of socialist politics.

Decision, Deliberation, and Democratic Ethos

According with the trend in democratic theory currently in vogue, in order to defend democracy it is necessary to give it rational foundations. Indeed, many theorists following this approach believe that it is by providing such foundations that allegiance to liberal democratic institutions will be secured. To criticize rationalism is, according to such a view, to undermine the very basis of democratic citizenship. Hence their rejection of the so-called critique which is presented as a threat to the democratic project. In this essay I will take a very different position. I will argue that it is only by drawing all the implications of the critique of essentialism -which in my view constitutes the more important insight of what is often referred to as the post-modem approachthat it is possible to grasp the nature of the political and acknowledge the challenge to which the democratic project is today confronted. I submit that the universalist and rationalist framework in which that project was formulated during the Enlightenment has today become as obstacle to an adequate understanding of the present stage of democratic politics. Such a framework should be discarded and this can be done without having to abandon the political aspect of the Enlightenment that is represented by the democratic revolution. On this point I propose to follow the lead of Hans Blumenberg who in his book The Legitimacy of the Modern Age' distinguishes two different logics in the Enlightenment, one of selfassertion (we could call it political), and one of self-grounding (we could call it epistemological).' According to him, these two logics have been articulated historically but there is no necessary relation between them and they can perfectly be separated. It is therefore possible to discriminate between was is truly modern-the idea of self-assertion-and what is merely what he calls a of a medieval position, i.e., an attempt to give a modem answer to a premodern question. In Blumenberg's view, rationalism is not something essential to the idea of self-assertion but a residue from the absolutist medieval problematic. This illusion of providing itself with its own foundations which accompanied the labor of liberation from theology should now be abandoned and modern reason should acknowledge its limits. Indeed, it is only when it comes to terms with pluralism and accepts the impossibility of total control and final harmony that modem reason frees itself from its premoden heritage. This approach also reveals the inadequacy of the term postmodernity when it is used to refer to a completely different historical period that would signify a break with modernity. When we realize that rationalism, far from being of modem reason, was in fact a reoccupation of a premodern position, it becomes clear that to put rationalism into question does not imply a rejection of modernity but a coming to terms with the potentialities that were inscribed in it since the beginning. It also help us to understand why the critique of the epistemological aspect of the Enlightenment does not jeopardize its political aspect of self-assertion but, on the contrary, can help to strengthen the democratic project. Anti-Essentialism and Politics In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy we attempted to draw the consequences of the critique of essentialism for a radical conception of democracy by articulating some of its insights with the Gramscian conception of hegemony. This led us to put the question of power and antagonism and their ineradicable character at the center of our approach. One of the main theses of the book is that social objectivity is constituted through acts of power. This means that any social objectivity is ultimately political and that it has to show the traces of exclusion that governs its constitution; what following Derrida, we have called its constitutive outside. The idea is that if an object has inscribed in its very being something other than itself; if as a result, everything is constructed as difference, its being cannot be conceived as pure presence or objectivity. …

Continuity or Change in Employment Relations? Evidence from the UK's Old Industrial Regions

Recent years have seen a considerable degree of change in the nature of employment relations, nowhere more so than in the UK's older industrial regions where new forms of work have partially replaced traditional activities. The author argues that such changes cannot automatically be read off as part of a wider transformation, but need to be firmly embedded within particular local social relations. Recognition of such complexities is necessary if suitable socialist strategies are to be developed.

Capitalist Restructuring and Socialist Strategies for the Port Transport Industry

Deregulation of industrial relations in the port industry by the Conservative government has led to lower employment, weaker trade unions and above all the reemergence of casual labour in the docks. This casualisation has resulted in an excessive fragmentation of operations that in turn has been harmful to an efficient port transport sector. The author argues that a new strategy for labour in the port industry needs to be formulated in the context of an economy-wide transport policy.

Die Außenansicht der europäischen Linken

In the framework of a world-system type of analysis, the perspectives of the European left after the decline of Soviel type socialism are described as a response to the polarization between the Third and the First World: In contrast to the capitalist mode of production in the centre, which operates as a market-based integration of the circulation of capital, of commodities and of labour power, labour in the periphery is blocked. In view of the contradiction between capital accumulation on a world-level and political and social governance on national levels, a socialist strategy should be based on a new internationalism, emphasizing regional alliances whose expansion is coupled to the increase in the unfettered mobility of labour.